Financial services corporations, and in particular, those offering credit accounts for making purchases, are constantly competing to attract new customers, as well as endeavoring to increase the opportunities for existing customers to make purchases using their credit accounts. Oftentimes, a financial services corporation adopts new hardware and telecommunication innovations to their services and products in an effort to increase its customer base or the amount of transactions they undertake. However, such innovations alone have constantly failed to increase uptake in certain market segments.
For example, most credit transactions up to the present day, whether undertaken by a corporation or an individual consumer, tend to fall within the same general range of transaction amounts. That is, there are relatively few high-dollar transactions in the present marketplace, even among corporations that have magnitudes greater purchasing power than the average consumer. It has become readily apparent that the low uptake in this market segment, among others, can not cured by simply speeding up or streamlining the quality of traditional financial services.
Recognizing the superiority of average corporate purchasing power, there have been several previous attempts to attract corporations in particular to adopt credit accounts by instead changing the traditional structure of a credit account without significant change to technology infrastructure. For example, offerings such as the P-CARD program offered by VISA can accommodate corporate accounting by assigning individual spending limits to the business credit card accounts of various employees of a corporation, and then tying all the individual accounts to one corporate credit account to which payment may be made. Other financial institutions offer single-use account identifiers for corporate accounts, or other security features, in an attempt to generate more corporate use of their services. Most such prior attempts, though, have still failed to capture a significant portion of a corporation's “high-dollar spend.”
Accordingly, there exists a need for a new payment processing system that addresses certain deficiencies in existing solutions.